The Peckham Project has three leading facades: two leaning in at 5 and 30 degrees, one leaning out at 20 degrees. This presents a technical issue for the window fabricators (air and water egress according to Velfac…) which lead us to the renovation of the John Hancock Centres’s observation deck which leans out 30 degrees to afford the viewer a vertiginous outlook of Chicago from 450m above ground level. In the video, the guy in the white shirt looks less enthralled…

Our Peckham project raises the question of what architectural value(s) can be assigned to the structural expression of exposed contiguous piling: aesthetically, commercially? Piling is not very sexy and is typically hidden behind a layer of applied cement but does it have to be like this? This is not the architecture language of hi-tech but deep-tech! Piling after all looks like a foundation colonnade. The pile depth can be a condition of the lateral load requirements of the site: a house to the North, roads to the South and West, a garden to East.

The slightly odd form of our proposal for Peckham is derived from its context: we call it a leaning mansard. It’s a mansard in deference to the adjoining property yet rather than lose headroom, our mansard leans towards the mature trees on the boundary. This has produced a technical issue whereby the brick work will also lean, rendering the entire facade as an over-scaled corbel. Whilst our structural engineers are worried about the induced lateral stresses created by the brick ties pulling on the CLT walls, I wondered if the corbel facade was to be self supporting, how far could lean? Welcome to the Mathematics of the Ideal Villa.Data Genetics asks: how far can you overhang blocks? The rules of this game are: 1. No glue! Blocks have to be placed and supported entirely by their own weights. 2. Only one block per level. We’re making a skewed tower. 3. All blocks are of the same shape, weight, and are of uniform density. The answer relates to defining the Centre of Mass and keeping this within the line of the foundation to avoid overturning…